The IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator

IBM's Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) was the first
supercomputer (1)
and the most powerful computer on earth from 1954 to about
1963, and remained in service until 1968. Built between 1950 and 1954 at
Columbia University's Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory 612 West 115th Street location, NORC's
specifications included [4,9]:

The CRT memory was converted to a 20,000-word 8-Ásec ferrite core memory
in a project contracted to Daystrom Instrument in 1958 for delivery in
mid-1959, and actually delivered in March 1960. According to the reports
at the time, NORC has 2000 words of Williams tube memory, not 3600, in which
case the upgrade represented a tenfold increase in capacity and
"the reduction in maintenance and error stops brought about by the new
memory ... netted about one extra hour of useful time out of each 24"
[115,116].

"Reliability was an extremely important objective of the NORC team,
beginning with initial design and construction of the machine and continuing
throughout its operational life span. The NORC's longevity (14 years),
attests to the success of this effort" [61]. As the University of Manchester NORC
page (see Links below) says, "Despite [its] high degree of complexity, 92%
of [NORC's] time was spent running productively at 15,000 operations per
second — a reliability the envy of many subsequent machines."

"A staff of nearly 60 people was required to assemble [NORC] from parts
manufactured by IBM and by various small subcontractors in the New York area,
including one in Paterson, N.J., who employed housewives, part time, to do
hand wiring" [40]. Meanwhile
"Mike the Expediter" (M.J. Plum)
would make daily forays to Cortland and Canal Streets for
parts [59].
Watson Lab NORC crew management
included [9,61]:

Engineer in Charge:

Byron Havens

Assistant Project Leader:

W.J. Deerhake (CU Adj Asst Prof EE)

Logic and Control Design:

Ken Schreiner

Circuit Design:

C.R. Borders

Mechanical Design:

Robert Schubert

Programming:

Joachim Jeenel

"Although the NORC was a cost-no-object, one-of-a-kind
machine, and outside the mainstream of computer development, its influence on
other computers was felt for many years. While it was under construction,
engineers building the 701 not only made use of the microsecond delay circuit
but also benefitted from Deerhake's work in overcoming difficulties
encountered in electrostatic storage -- which the 701 also
used." [9] The NORC also included the
first input-output channel, which
synchronized the flow of
data into and out of the computer while computation was in progress,
relieving the central processor of that task, a concept that was quickly
adopted across the industry.

Here's another view. This photo was published in IBM Business
Machines, 23 December 1954 [58];
Byron Havens is on the right. The copy shown here (like the image at the top)
is scanned from an original 8x10 glossy from IBM's press kit, contributed by
Ken Schreiner, chief logic and control design engineer on the NORC project.

(Maximize your browser to magnify)

From J.A.N. Lee's column in the 50th anniversary issue of IEEE
Computer:

The Naval Surface Weapons Center at Dahlgren, Virginia, was the primary
site of US naval computing, beginning with the 1948 installation of Howard
Aiken's Mark II, followed by the Mark III in 1951. The center's next
machine, the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC), was built at the
Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory under the direction of Wallace
Eckert. Initially, NORC had been scheduled for delivery to the White Oak
Naval Facility near Washington, D.C., but the Navy redirected it to the
experienced crew at Dahlgren. Physicist Edward Teller had been trying to
have it diverted to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, arguing
that the lab's nuclear calculations were more important than Dahlgren's
ballistic calculations. The Navy won, and NORC was dedicated at Dahlgren
on December 2, 1954. John von Neumann, who had just completed work on the
IAS machine, was the keynote speaker.

(In fact the dedication was held at Watson Lab; NORC was not moved to
Dahlgren until summer 1955 [4].)

Admiral Solomons had been captain of the destroyer USS Morris, that was in the
battles of Coral Sea and Midway and was eventually crippled by a Kamikaze
attack off Okinawa. Not shown, but also present: future IBM chairman Thomas
J. Watson Junior, Vice-Admiral L.T. Du Bose (who had commanded the heavy
cruiser USS Portland at the battle of Midway),
Columbia president Grayson Kirk, some other university
presidents, Columbia's Ben Wood and Hilleth Thomas, numerous IBM officials, Watson Lab's
NORC engineers, 200 other "scientific, business, and military leaders."
NORC itself, which calculated π to 3000 digits for
the occasion [9,58], is in the
background.

NORC was a three-address machine ("multiply A times B and store the result
in C"). It was programmed directly in machine language; assemblers came
later. Ken King (then a Watson Fellow, i.e. Columbia PhD student at Watson
Lab) programmed the demo and corrects the record as follows: "I computed
π and e (the base of the natural logarithms) to 1,000,000 places
at the dedication of the Norc because John von Neumann wanted to confirm
that the digits were random." [65]

Ken Schreiner [61] recalls, "The major
honored guests arrived in the morning, and that is when the photos of the
'VIPs' were taken within the confines of the NORC installation. Others (the
remainder of the 200 people) came first to the Luncheon at the Men's Faculty
Club [on West 117th Street, on the far side of campus]... John von Neumann
was the featured speaker. During the hours that followed the luncheon, guests
filtered in and out of the NORC room, viewing the machine, receiving
demonstrations, and getting answers to questions. Because the whole thing was
stretched out in time, I don't believe there were any traffic jams." (In
1954, Columbia had separate Men's and Women's Faculty Clubs; now there is only
a Faculty Club.)

Ken King recalls [65] that
in the six months between NORC's completion and its delivery to Navy,
"Dan Tycho and I, as thesis students of LH Thomas, computed the wave functions
of the Helium atom on the Norc (Dan Tycho's Ph.D dissertation). This was done
under the rubric of testing the machine." Of course Professor Eckert also had
access to the machine, and used it to work on the problem of the position of
the moon by computing the ephemerides directly from
Brown's equations. The task was immense involving some 1,650
trigonometric terms, many of them with variable coefficients, yet the accuracy
of the results was so good that in 1965 he was able to correctly show that
there was a concentration of mass near the lunar surface (source:
O'Connor
and Robertson).

In 1958, Eckert said of NORC, "A calculation involving a billion arithmetical
operations on large numbers can be completed on the Norc in approximately one
day, yet more powerful calculators are foreseen to to meet the ever-increasing
demands of science and technology where the solution of a large problem
generates even larger problems." [81].

Six photos from IBM's December 1954 NORC press kit, plus newspaper clippings
and a program, contributed by Ken Schreiner, plus several other images.
According to Prof. Eckert, "most of the photographs were taken by
Mr. A.W. Hummers" [64]. It is worth
noting IBM's use of the word "computer" in its photo captions; this might be
the first time IBM used this term (rather than "automatic calculator" or "data
processing machine") to denote a stored-program computing device. Click on an
image to magnify. Full-size images occupy 100% of the width of your browser,
so if you maximize your browser window, you'll get a full-screen image.

Photo

IBM Caption

The Naval Ordnance Research Calculator, built by
International Business Machines Corporation for the U.S. Navy, is the
most powerful computer in existence. This photo
shows NORC's logical and arithmetial unit (right), console (center), magnetic
tape units (left, rear), indicator panel (rear) and printer (left,
forgeground).

NORC ... the most powerful large-scale
electronic computer ever produced. It was built at Watson Scientific
Computing Laboratory, operated by Columbia University. In this photo are
pictured the console (center), logical and arithmetical unit (rear), indicator
panel (left, rear), printers and tape units (extreme left and right).

This view ... shows, in the foreground, one of the two
printers used in the installation. Each can print at the rate of 18,000
characters per minute. The printers, which record data without interrupting
calculation, give the operator and mathematician a complete picture of the
progress of the problem and provide a permanent printed record of results for
later study. ... A single operator ... can start and stop the machine and
modify the instruction program during calculations.

Shown here is the control console of the NORC. Switches can
be used to start and stop the machine and to modify the written program. In
normal operation, however, the calculator proceeds automatically according to
instructions, recorded on magnetic tape, without control by th eoperator. Any
number or instruction in the calculator can be shown on the faces of cathode
ray tubes, at left. Selected portions of the program also can be examined in
slow motion through this display.

The completely electronic logical and arithmetical section
of the NORC is composed of vacuum tubes, resistors, condensers and crystal
rectifiers arranged in circuits. These circuits perform arithmetic and other
logical operations and control all parts of the machine. Responsible for the
NORC's tremendous speed, this circuitry is the culmination of continued work
by scientists and engineers in harnessing the speed of the electron to
computing.

Operating instructions and program data are read into the
NORC from the ultra high-speed magnetic tape units shown here. More than five
times faster than the fastest magnetic tape units
currently in use, each of eight of these units can read and write more
than 70,000 digits per second, a speed equivalent to that of 14,000 typists.
In addition to their use for input and ouput, the tapes also store
intermediate results during calculations.

NORC's memory bank, which is behind the arithmetic and
logical unit and therefore out of sight. 3600 66-bit words of memory in 264
Cathode Ray Tubes. Each word represents 16 decimal digits and includes two
check bits. Each tube has 900 bit locations; four sets of 66 tubes are
employed in the full 3600-word memory. Four tubes are packaged together in a
modular metal drawer.
Photo and information from [64].

NORC's Tape-to-Card and Card-to-Tape machines. NORC did not
have its own card reader or punch; its only input device was tape, and output
was only to tape and printer. "The human being does not like to read coded
invisible spots, packed 500 to the inch, on a tape a quarter of a mile long."
The CTC (Card-Tape-Card) machine converts from cards to tape, and vice versa,
allowing NORC to interface with key punches, sorters, collators, and so on.
Photo and information from [64].

Closeup of NORC's Arithmetic-Logical Unit, from Reference 2
below.

New York Herald Tribune photo and articles, December 1-3,
1954.

NORC Dedication Program, December 2, 1954.

1954 IBM newsreel of NORC in action at Watson Lab (offsite).

NORC at the US Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren, Virginia,
about 1957, from Reference 5 below. Console operator unknown; center:
Mary Louise McKee, right: Dave Eliezer (Deputy Branch Head, Programming
Branch). Ms. McKee was one of the first NORC programmers; she recounts the
time she wrote a routine to plot a greeting in Russian on the CRT, only to
have the Soviet military visitor try to correct the spelling by taking an
eraser to the tube. CLICK HERE for another
version of the same photo from a brochure, "Careers in Mathematics",
Department of Mathematics, Louisiana State University.

A higher-resolution version of the previous photo, with
labels and a legend.

A Happy Birthday cartoon from the NORC shop in Dahlgren,
by Jack S. Darling.

Closeup of one of the tubes from the Digital Logic Unit.
The ID plate identifies the Navy Contract under which the NORC was
built as NORD 11866, and identifies the unit as 53A.

Another NORC Digital Logic Unit, this one type 46A,
presented to Emma Payne McCall of Dahlgren at some point in her tenure
there, which spanned the 1950s through the 1970s, submitted by her grandson,
Gerhard S. Schoenthal, with a biographical sketch of his grandmother by
his mother Rosemary: “Emma Payne McCall, my mother, went to work at
the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory in the early 1950ĺs. There were very few
women in positions other than clerical ones at the time...”

The first supercomputer in the sense that it was the first whose
declared purpose was to surpass all other computers and that
there was a significant number of other computers to surpass (thus one would
not call ENIAC or ASCC a
supercomputer); in Eckert's words, "The aim has been to incorporate in this
'one-of-a-kind' calculator the most advanced developments to produce a
calculator particularly suited to the solution of the large complex problems.
To this end no effort has been spared to secure extremely high speed, great
reliability, and simplicity of operation". Von Neumann named it "the most
advanced machine which is possible in the present state of the art." It was
not outpaced until the appearance of Seymour Cray's CDC 6600 in 1964, which is
also sometimes cited as the "first supercomputer", but 10 years after NORC.
It is true, however, that the term "supercomputer" was not coined until some
years after NORC, most likely for the Ferranti Atlas or CDC 6600.
Nevertheless, various histories list NORC as the first supercomputer (e.g.
[57]). Another
[40] calls SSEC (also
designed at Watson Lab) the first supercomputer.

According to the
IBM
historical archive,
"NORC's fame was extended literally out of this world when astronomer Dr. Paul Herget, Director of the Cincinnati Observatory,
arranged to name an asteroid discovered in 1953 for the computer. (The
asteroid Norc revolves around the Sun once every 5.6 years in an orbit
between Mars and Jupiter.) Under Dr. Herget's direction, and the
sponsorship of the Office of Naval Research and the National Science
Foundation, the earthbound NORC was used to compute the orbits of celestial
bodies, including the most precise orbit of the Earth for the 1920-2000
period. In discussing one of NORC's accomplishments in May 1956, Dr. Herget
said: 'We used nine hours of running time and completed more computations
than had ever before been done at one time in the history of astronomy.'"

Explanatory Supplement to the
Astronomical Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, prepared jointly by the
Nautical Almanac Offices of the United Kingdom and the United States of
America: H.M. Nautical Almanac Office by Order of the Lords Commission
of the Admiralty, London, Her Majesty's Stationey Office (1961).